style="font-size:15px;"> You may find you need some extra help to move on, as the lady who approached a life coach did. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, from whichever source you feel most comfortable with – a counsellor, a life coach, a therapist, your minister, your guardian angel or your god. You have made the decision to move on; if you need extra help, take it.
When you reach the turning point, you can take action by acknowledging the truth, thereby allowing yourself to deal with the anger and move on to happiness and contentment.
CHAPTER TWO
Take Responsibility for Your Life
While we are not responsible for the decisions and actions of others (as we saw in the last chapter) we are always responsible for our own decisions and actions, although sometimes we would rather not admit it.
If he had shown me more affection I wouldn’t have needed an affair …
She went on at me until I hit her. She should have left it. I can go out with my mates if I want.
These two readers were trying to transfer blame and therefore responsibility to their partners. On occasions we are all guilty of blaming others for our actions and the reason we do so is obvious. If only he/she hadn’t I wouldn’t have … They shouldn’t have put temptation in my way … etc. Transferring the blame, in our eyes, transfers the responsibility and therefore lets us off, or so we would like to believe. Clearly this is untrue, for we are only transferring the responsibility in our minds. No one else has accepted responsibility for our actions. We haven’t been let off the hook: we are simply in denial.
A man aged forty-three wrote: I blame my father for always criticizing me as a child. I couldn’t do anything right. If I got a B grade he said I should have got an A. If I scored a goal he asked me why I’d missed the other two shots. The man wrote that in adult life he reacted very badly if he thought anyone was criticizing him, becoming angry and aggressive, even when the criticism was in fact constructive feedback from his boss at work. He knew he was over-sensitive to what he perceived as criticism and his reaction was causing a problem both at work and in his private life. His wife felt she was ‘walking on egg shells’ and daren’t say anything in case he took it personally.
From what the man said it was likely his father had been over-critical, but by using his father as a convenient scapegoat for any negatives in his life, and failing to take responsibility for his own failings, he was endangering his relationships at home and work. I have been taken aback by the number of other readers in middle age and older who are still able to blame their parents (or carers) for all that was wrong in their present lives. No parent is perfect; parents are fallible human beings and will get their parenting wrong as often as they get it right. Without doubt some people have easier and happier childhoods than others, but as adults we owe it to ourselves to take responsibility for the present and future and move on. As a general guideline, if you haven’t taken responsibility for your own life by the age of twenty-five, then you need to do so ASAP. Otherwise life will be a series of missed opportunities, regrets, discontent and unhappiness. While we can’t change the past, by taking responsibility we can change the present and future. The key to our success is entirely in our own hands.
As well as blaming others and assigning to them responsibility for our lives, we are also very good at blaming situations, circumstances and even fate. I know I’m not being offered the jobs because of my size, wrote one reader who was in her mid-twenties and weighed 25 stone. Her CV was excellent and she was readily called for interview for jobs as a receptionist. But as soon as she walked into the interview room, she said, she knew from the look on the interviewers’ faces that she wouldn’t be offered the job. There is a lot of prejudice towards large people which won’t change overnight. The harsh reality is that if the woman wants a job as a receptionist she is going to have to take responsibility and diet, or accept that she must look for a job where her appearance doesn’t have to conform to a norm.
A lad of eighteen who had failed his exams and dropped out of school wrote: I have a big family with six stepbrothers and sisters. There was never anywhere that was quiet for me to study. That’s why I failed. He was bemoaning being unemployed and having no money. I appreciated that it must have been difficult for him to study at home, but if he had taken responsibility he could have found somewhere quiet to study, such as the library or homework club at school. Even though he now recognized he needed qualifications to get a job, he was still refusing to take responsibility. One option would have been to enrol in a college course to gain the qualifications he needed, and his mother had suggested this, but the lad had a ready list of excuses as to why this or any other suggestion wouldn’t work. Until he took responsibility for his life he was going to continue disgruntled and without a job.
A woman, aged forty-five, who had been in foster care for a year at the age of eight, wrote that she blamed all that was currently wrong in her life, including her two sons being drug dependent, her husband’s domestic violence and her obesity, on being in care thirty-seven years previously. While I would never minimize the disruption being taken into care (or any other trauma over which a person has no control) can have on a young person’s life, by allowing a crisis in her past to become a convenient peg on which to hang responsibility for all her woes and misfortunes, this woman was not taking any responsibility for them herself.
Whether we are suffering as a result of an unhappy/abusive childhood, losing a job, a hurtful comment or action, a failed relationship or a divorce, bereavement, ill health or a fateful encounter, at some point we have to take responsibility for our lives and deal with whatever needs to be changed. Otherwise we are like flotsam on a wave – sloshed around at the will of the tide and never in control of our destiny.
A man, aged twenty-three, who drank excessively and drove while intoxicated, was stopped by the police, heavily fined and banned from driving for two years. He was then sacked from his job, which required a clean driving licence. He blamed fate and an old friend: If I hadn’t stopped off at that pub after work I wouldn’t have met him and none of this would have happened. A better response, where the man took responsibility, would have been: What an idiot I was! But I’ve learnt my lesson. When I get my licence back I’ll never drink and drive again. In the meantime I’ll have to find a job for which I don’t need a driving licence.
Taking responsibility for your life is fantastic! It puts you at the steering wheel and you can go wherever you want. Yes, it can appear a bit frightening before you begin your journey. But once you have assumed responsibility for your life and therefore your destiny, you’ll wonder how you ever managed before.
What you gain from taking responsibility
Let’s look at all the positive outcomes from taking responsibility for your life; there are no negatives!
1. Empowerment. Taking responsibility empowers you. Once you are in charge you can do anything you wish – even fly to the moon, as long as you train as an astronaut first. You decide what you want to do with your life – where you want to be in a week, a month, a year, ten years – and go for it. Many years ago when I was struggling as a writer, receiving more rejection slips than cheques, I was inspired by the maxim We are only limited by the extent of our imagination. It is so true, and by taking responsibility we empower ourselves to achieve whatever our hearts and minds desire.
2. Liberation. Taking responsibility liberates you from the constraints of others. If you pass responsibility for your life to others you will live in the shadow of their experiences, expectations, successes and failures, and this will result in you becoming frustrated and discontented. Once you take responsibility for your life you are no longer beholden to the actions, attitudes or opinions of others, and a huge burden lifts from your shoulders.
One woman, aged thirty-four, who was juggling family life
